The title combines the acronym of the 1987 R.E.M. song and the title of the 2013 survival movie starring Robert Redford, suggesting that this will not be a hopeful post. The cartoon by Robert Crumb was incredibly prescient, considering it was done sometime around the ‘70s. His only mistake was the time frame. He likely was unaware of the concepts of tipping points and positive feedback loops.
I was born too soon to be considered a baby-boomer, so I’ve been around for a while. Having post-graduate degrees in biology and medicine, I consider myself a scientist and insist on evaluating evidence realistically rather than optimistically. My views have been influenced by many sources and readings, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States) and Michael Ruppert (Confronting Collapse). Ruppert predicted the end of industrialized civilization by 2030 and took his own life, some friends suspect because he had lost hope.
Denial is a psychological defense mechanism to avoid a painful reality. It is suggested by the title of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Most citizens, it seems, would prefer a convenient, comforting lie. Denial is the first of the five Kubler Ross stages of grief, and the extinction of the human species would certainly be something to grieve about.
I personally lost hope when the U. S. Supreme Court intervened in our democratic processes and handed the presidency in 2000 to Dubya (a man who can only appear to have a brain when compared to the vile, festering human chancre who contaminated the White House in the past decade and plunged the world even further toward the annihilation of “the world as we know it.”). At that point in time our fate was sealed. I stopped contributing to conservation organizations. It was pointless. A tipping point was passed, not in the workings of the planet, but in the focus of the world’s population on the most important issue--our survival. There was a PSA for asthma with the quote, “When you can’t breathe, nothing else matters.” Likewise, one could say that when the planet is dying, nothing else matters.
People who are knowledgeable in the matter have said that the time to address this issue is 30 years ago. The horse left the barn quite some time back, and we’re still talking about how to close the barn door. It is like we’re all in a vehicle careening down a highway at 100 mph toward a steel-reinforced concrete wall, and all the occupants are arguing over the seating arrangements. Another apt metaphor is that we are busy rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
My dismal view was reinforced when I came across an article, “When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job “ I started reading books like The Sixth Extinction and Requiem for a Species. While those book tried to strike a hopeful note, the facts laid out made it fairly clear that the “end times” that all the kooks have been talking about have actually arrived.
We have all had the privilege of living in the time of peak everything, the highest standard of living in human history. Now things have started to go south and will continue to do so with an accelerating rapidity. Things will never be this good again. A genetic bottleneck suggests that humans barely survived a catastrophic event 70,000 years ago, the Toba super eruption. That was a natural disaster. The one coming is of our own making and is more catastrophic. We’ll likely not squeak by this time.
Over 20 years ago I read an article in Discover magazine about what happened on Easter Island, revealed by archeological and biological research. The parallels between what happened there and what is happening in the world today are most striking. After arriving 1600 years ago, the Polynesian islanders’ culture and technology developed to the point, five to eight centuries ago, of constructing the massive stone heads, transported by palm trees that may have been six feet in diameter. The population may have been around 20,000. By 1400 the palm trees were extinct, and the forests disappeared soon after. Mammals, seabirds and native land birds vanished. Other than domesticated chickens and the human inhabitants, no animals existed larger than insects on the island when discovered by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen in 1722.. The largest vegetation was bushes and small trees. A quote from the article: “What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?” Also: “Easter Island is Earth writ small.” Alluding to the last lines of a T. S. Elliott poem, “With the risk of nuclear war receding, the threat of our ending with a bang no longer has a chance of galvanizing us to halt our course. Our risk now is of winding down, slowly, in a whimper.”
As a teenager, I read a book by Nevil Shute, On the Beach, later made into a movie. It was a post-apocalyptic story about a nuclear holocaust. The northern hemisphere had already been destroyed, and the only humans left were in Australia, Antarctica and other southern hemisphere locations. Equatorial trade winds were moving the deadly radiation southward, and it was only a matter of time before all humankind would succumb. As an impressionable youth, it put me in a depressive funk, even though I knew, intellectually, it was only fiction. Everyday concerns no longer seemed to matter. “What’s the point? It will all be over soon.” I still remember the emotional state that put me in. But that’s where we are now. And this time it’s real.
The hubris and greed of humankind seems to have no limit, as we fail to learn the lessons given to us by the histories of failed nations and societies.We ignore the warnings of climate scientists and the pleas of young activists like Greta Thunberg. “Adults keep saying: We owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”
Yes, it’s panic time. As in “Soylent Green is people!” Or, from Twilight Zone’s To Serve Man, “It’s a Cookbook!” But panic won’t save us. Nothing will save us. We’re fucked.
Post Script: I know the Pollyannas in the DK community will be upset with my post. Too bad. Ignoring reality changes nothing. I would love to be wrong, but I’m not. The curse of Cassandra has long legs. My local paper recently published a column by a shill for the Heritage Foundation that stated, basically, “Pay no attention to that latest IPCC report. They’re just a bunch of scientists. What do they know? Everything’s going to be fine,” disputing the dire warnings of an international agency of the looming cataclysm.
I still use electric vehicles and devices. I still eschew beef. I still recycle. I still hike and maintain hiking trails. What else is there to do? But it is all like throwing popcorn at a grizzly bear. Or the Alabama man dying of Covid who begged for the vaccine. Too little too late. Mother Nature (or Gaia, if you will) is neither cruel nor compassionate. Just unrelenting. She is done with us. We have forfeited our right to continue as a pestilence on the planet. We had a nice run as a species, but we have been condemned by our stupidity.
As Heinlein wrote. “. . . stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”
Albert Einstein was supposed to have said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.”
Saddest of all, the innocent will share the fate of the guilty.